Written by

Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY

NEW YORK -- At one of the first press screenings of the hotly anticipated film version of Les Miserables held last month before its opening on Christmas Day, magic struck at the half-hour mark.

With street-grimy rags and butchered hair, Anne Hathaway as woeful prostitute Fantine whispers, weeps and angrily wails her way through a single live take of one of the stage show's signature anthems of suffering, I Dreamed a Dream.

It was real. It was raw. And it wasn't pretty. But that is the point in this highly intimate and extreme close-up interpretation of Les Mis, with its restless camerawork awash ...